Pollster Nate Silver says 'gut' tells him Trump will win election

While pollster Nate Silver revealed last month that he'd vote for Vice President Kamala Harris on Nov. 5, his "gut" is telling him that former President Trump will win.

Silver set the scene in his new opinion piece by noting that several battleground states have Trump and Harris neck-and-neck. But those numbers don't seem to satisfy observers, who he said often ask him for a straight answer.

"So OK, I’ll tell you," Silver wrote in The New York Times on Wednesday. "My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats."

He says his intuition is partly driven by the notion of nonresponse bias, musing that pollsters aren’t reaching enough of Trump's supporters. 

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Former President Trump waves at a campaign rally at Greensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Tuesday. (AP/Alex Brandon)

"Nonresponse bias can be a hard problem to solve," Silver wrote. "Response rates to even the best telephone polls are in the single digits — in some sense, the people who choose to respond to polls are unusual. Trump supporters often have lower civic engagement and social trust, so they can be less inclined to complete a survey from a news organization. 

"Pollsters are attempting to correct for this problem with increasingly aggressive data-massaging techniques, like weighing by educational attainment (college-educated voters are more likely to respond to surveys) or even by how people say they voted in the past. There’s no guarantee any of this will work."

But Silver doesn't leave Democrats without any hope. He suggests there is a way that Harris can "beat the polls."

"A surprise in polling that underestimates Ms. Harris isn’t necessarily less likely than one for Mr. Trump," he wrote. "On average, polls miss by three or four points. If Ms. Harris does that, she will win by the largest margin in both the popular vote and the Electoral College since Mr. Obama in 2008."

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Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the vice president's residence in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

Silver recently highlighted data that appeared to be "pretty negative" for Harris.

"There are now three recent high-quality national polls that show Donald Trump leading — a difficult circumstance for Harris, given Democrats’ Electoral College disadvantage — and her edge in our national polling average is down to 1.7 points," Silver wrote on his Substack. "National polls don't influence the model that much, and the race remains basically a toss-up, but it’s not hard to think of reasons that Trump could win."

He referenced a recent Fox News Poll, which shows Trump ahead of Harris in the presidential contest 50%-48%, marking a reversal from last month when Harris had a narrow edge. Silver also cited the TIPP tracking poll, which showed Trump overtaking Harris by a 2-point lead, 49% to 47%. 

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Democratic strategist James Carville, meanwhile, said he's "certain" the election will swing the other way.

A woman fills out a ballot at a polling station at Morgan State University in Baltimore during early voting in Maryland on Oct. 26, 2020. (Reuters/Hannah McKay)

"America, it will all be OK. Ms. Harris will be elected the next president of the United States. Of this, I am certain," he wrote in a New York Times column on Wednesday.

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Silver, who advised his readers not to blindly trust his gut, offered one more potential outcome in his Times piece: that pollsters could be wrong and this won't be a photo finish at all. With polling averages so tight, he said, even a small systematic polling error like the one seen in 2016 or 2020 "could produce a comfortable Electoral College victory for Ms. Harris or Mr. Trump."